FICO European Fraud Map: UK resilient as other European countries see losses climb by up to 21%
The 2025 European Fraud Map from global analytics software leader FICO (NYSE: FICO) shows that the UK financial services sector is making good strides in preventing fraud, as card fraud losses rose by just 2% year-on-year. This is in stark contrast to many European countries, including Norway, Sweden, Poland, Hungary and Greece, where fraud losses have jumped by 15% or more year-on-year. Across the continent, card fraud losses have reached an all-time high of €1.69bn.
More information: https://www.fico.com/en/europeanfraud
Reporting card fraud losses of £594.9m in 2025, up slightly from £592.5m in 2024, the UK remains below the peak of £620.6m seen in 2019. Within these losses, Card-not-Present fraud increased slightly, from £412.5m in 2024 to £423.5m in 2025. The data for the map is provided by Euromonitor International, and for the UK by UK Finance.
“The biggest threat to the UK financial services ecosystem is the relentless use of social engineering tactics, requiring multiple strategies to thwart fraudsters across the full customer journey,” said Sarah Cassidy, senior fraud consultant at FICO in EMEA. “In particular, banks are seeing a concerning trend of consumers being tricked into divulging one-time passwords which allows fraudsters to connect the cards to their own devices and e-wallets. Once this ‘authentic’ token is created the fraudster can spend large amounts unchecked.”
Other highlights from the report for the UK:
- ID fraud losses in the UK fell 12% from £61.5m in 2024 to £54m in 2025, despite the unprecedented acceleration in AI technology, which is allowing fraudsters to create increasingly convincing synthetic identities
- Losses from Card Lost or Stolen also decreased, from £111.7m to £109.8m year-on-year
- According to UK Finance data, the number of fraud cases has risen along with the number of cards in circulation. The threat of cards being taken by a fraudster is significant, particularly as changes to regulation around contactless limits mean a stolen card could yield more money before being PIN locked.
“While social engineering is a key concern across Europe, the UK has demonstrated its resilience against such attacks and has also made good strides in tackling ID fraud,” Cassidy said. “However, while fraud losses are under control for now, cases are still on the rise, and it is imperative that banks act. They must strengthen their fraud prevention across the full customer journey to successfully fight sophisticated fraud. AI tools, comprehensive customer profiling and monitoring of all transactional and non-transactional events will allow banks to detect patterns, pick up on warning signs and stop fraud and scams before losses occur.”
Intelligent decisioning across the account lifecycle is critical to understand how fraudsters target any link in the chain in order to exploit a bank account. Some UK banks are already utilising the award-winning Scam Signal solution, which is helping them identify the subtle markers of social engineering to intervene on scams before money leaves an account. The first real-time application bringing together telephony, customer and payment data to tackle the issue of APP fraud, the tool detects potential scam activity and enables banks to intervene with the customer if necessary.
Complementing Scam Signal, FICO’s fraud solutions portfolio includes the AI-powered FICO® Falcon® Fraud Manager, which protects more than 4 billion cards worldwide and its newest solution, FICO® Enterprise Fraud Solution, powered by FICO® Platform.
